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You will inevitably have to give some sort of visual presentation as part of your company's business, whether in sales meetings with clients or objectives meetings with employees. Using PowerPoint presentations gives you a way to visually organize your points for viewers so that they know what to focus on in your talk, while ensuring that you make your objectives for presenting this content clear. By clearly stating your objectives at the beginning of your presentation, you give your audience the opportunity to understand what your goals are, what to expect from the presentation and how to interpret the content that you present.

1.

Lay out your objectives in advance. Break down your larger topic into smaller, logical parts. Break them down again, if you can. Try to find the combination of discussion points that best represents your larger goal, and organize them in such a way that a listener can follow them. The point of a presentation is to convince an audience of your ideas, and the best way to do that is to lead them to a conclusion through persuasive organization of ideas.

2.

Consider the best tactic to convince your audience of your ideas. If you are comparing two items, lay out your discussion so that it has two major sections, with smaller points highlighting advantages and disadvantages of each choice. If suggesting a solution to a problem, make that problem clear at the beginning, and walk through each step of your solution.

3.

Create an opening slide that touches on all of your ideas in bullet point format. It is acceptable, and actually quite beneficial, to lay out exactly what you will say in the presentation. This gives the listener a sense of what they are in store for, and also helps you set the stage for what you are trying to convey. An opening set of slides may be as long as two slides, but if you cannot fit the gist of your presentation within two or fewer slides, consider narrowing the focus of your presentation, or giving multiple presentations over a period of time.

4.

State your objectives clearly, and briefly discuss their importance. For example, if one of your objectives is to convince your audience that a particular course of action must be taken, clearly state this conclusion with a short explanation of how you have come to it.

For example, "In this presentation, I intend to show that my strategy addresses concerns about profit loss by illustrating areas where improvements can be made in our marketing department and production techniques" represents a clear, goal-oriented opening. It details the objectives while alluding to what sort of content the viewers can expect -- areas of deficiency in marketing and production.

5.

Avoid front-loading data or facts. Let the objectives speak for themselves. Content objectives should frame your presentation and the data in such a way that they help an audience "see" what you see in the data, and convince them of your argument.

For example, "Sales in areas with new marketing departments have dropped 3% in the last three quarters due to factors A, B and C, while production rates are also highly inefficient due to mismanagement of warehouse resources owing to X, Y and Z. Therefore, I am going to demonstrate how these factors have led to..." While this seems an informative way to lay out your objectives, for a spoken presentation it is better to keep it brief.

6.

Use a slide for each objective discussed in the opening of the presentation. If a particular objective takes a little longer to discuss, two or more slides should work. Just be careful not to overload slides with extraneous information. Your slides simply outline your speech, or give backing material. Your speech should do the heavy lifting in getting your point across.